Laptop dock CrowView Note now on Kickstarter
By Rob Zwetsloot. Posted
We’ve covered several products from the Crow line by Elecrow over the past year, and we were very interested to hear about CrowView Note, what they’re billing as a ‘portable monitor with keyboard’ and what is reminding us of laptop docks of yore smartphone manufacturers tried to sell.
It’s been over a decade since then and technology has improved, plus with some specialisations meant for Raspberry Pi, we were excited to see how a dock of this type in 2024 could work.
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While we’ve not had enough time to assess it for review yet, we’ve had a chance to play with one for a bit with a Raspberry Pi 5 and we’re very intrigued by it. CrowView has speakers, a webcam, a microphone, and an in-built battery so all you need to do is provide a Raspberry Pi to get it functioning like a true laptop. It’s very light too as it doesn’t have as much internal hardware as a real laptop.
There’s no extra software you need to add for that extra hardware either – the closest SD card we could find had been a fresh install and we were able to use the mouse and keyboard straight away to set it up.
At the time of writing this, the project just launched and already hit its funding goal, so that’s a good sign a lot of other folks are interested in it as well.
Look out for a full review in a future issue of The MagPi.
Rob is amazing. He’s also the Features Editor of Raspberry Pi Official Magazine, a hobbyist maker, cosplayer, comic book writer, and extremely modest.
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